Who needs Tiger Woods when you can option the manufacturer of the famous I-Trax and Tour Blue putters? True golf fans might tremble at the prospect of purchasing virtual versions of these treasures, but that's about all they'll have to be excited about. Callaway Golf simulates only the short game, which is the one part of golf that's least likely to be satisfactorily simulated with a control pad. Typically, games offer players a single meter with which to control putt speed and distance. Callaway presents one more level of complexity, in the form of...another meter. Without the chance to use the Callaway "Big Bertha" driver, you'll tire of this minigame in minutes.
In Callaway Golf, you play against the tour pro, who's actually a pretty mediocre putter. You'll play on several greens of varying difficulty, although the game's distance guide ensures you'll never encounter too much of a challenge. Whenever you're faced with a putt, an arrow will point to the exact point on the meter at which you should stop the cursor from sliding. If you're putting uphill, you might have to apply slightly more power than is recommended. Next, you'll use Callaway's revolutionary second meter to decide where on the putter you'd like to connect with the ball. Chances are you'll want to choose the very center. At least, that's what the Callaway pro might tell you if he weren't too busy missing his putts. You can two-putt your way to pars or go for a one-shot birdie. Alternately, if you tire of this drudgery, you can just hit your ball all over the green, like an enraged Happy Gilmore.
Callaway Golf is shown from a bird's-eye perspective that makes its greens look more like oceanic depth charts. The grass textures used to differentiate the terrain resemble strips of felt, layered on top of one another in someone's tabletop model. Adding to the artificiality are the tiny, sprite-based golfers, which don't blend in at all with the blandly textured, prerendered terrain. The graphical highlight is a picture-in-picture close-up of the hole that's triggered when your ball approaches. Even this doesn't look particularly good, though.
The game's sound and music fare a bit better than the graphics on the LG VX7000. Some polyphonic MIDI swing jazz plays over the splash screen and title menu and fulminates with a brass section breakdown. In the game, you'll hear the oohs and aahs of the invisible audience, as well as the sound of a sinking putt.
Callaway's exclusion of every aspect of golf--save the putting--doesn't serve any obvious purpose, other than to bore anyone who plays. You're not going to shave strokes off your short game as a result of playing this half-baked title, even if it does boast one more meter than the leading putting simulation.
